computers should be less friendly

So far the highlight of TechEd for me has been people’s reaction to Majority Desk.  I said to a number of people before the demo that everyone’s reactions would be the same, “Oh my god…”  The problem is that that reaction would come because of two very different reasons, “Oh my god… what is wrong with you people that has no business value!” or “Oh my god… that is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.” 

It seems that most people fall in the latter category.  I’ve already spoke to a number SDNers from all different industries who see how they can use this type of interface in a broad range of applications.  A airplane manufacturer navigating large engineering drawings to business people visualizing data sets in 3d to see patterns.  This was the reaction we were hoping to create in the community a true sense of innovation and possibility.  It’s also been a blast watching people mess around with the interface.

Here are some great photos from hacker night with Mark Finnern and Marilyn Pratt messing around with Majority Desk.

Before the Demo Jam got started we gave James and Coté from RedMonk a sneak peek of our demo called Majority Desk.  Majority Desk is a 3d virtual environment that allows you to interact with Flex based widgets with the help of a pair of Wiimotes.   Coté talks a bit about Majority Desk but, a video is worth 1,000 words * 32 * (length of video).

Big thanks to Coté at Redmonk for getting this video up so quickly!

For those of you at TechEd you can drop by the clubhouse at 5 to “get your Wiihands on” MajorityDesk.

Also we will be talking about the architecture and the OSS we used at this evening’s hacker night.

What do you do when you can’t make it to a conference because your boss won’t pay or you can’t find the time?  Well, if you are a SAP professional you can attend bits of the conference in Second Life.  SAP has began an interesting experiment to broadcast parts of the their developer conference, TechEd, in Second Life.

This is the “Community Clubhouse” where a session is going on with people in their first life in Las Vegas and two people at SAP’s office in Second Life.  These two people couldn’t make it to the conference so they attended a roundtable style discussion about business KPIs from the comfort of their offices in Palo Alto and Germany.  I’m still not 100% sold on Second Life and it’s use in business but, what I do believe is at that it can greatly increase your communication bandwidth.  Since Linden added the ability to stream audio in it has moved far beyond just a phone call and stepped ahead of video conferencing on the communication bandwidth scale.   The idea of have a “physical” person moving around immerses you in the conversation much more then video conferencing can.  This side benefits of this immersion should be pretty obvious for both conferences and large multi-nationals to allow better collaboration among distributed teams.

Also if you are interested in what has already happened check out Craig Cmehil’s uStream channel to watch all the sessions that were live streamed yesterday from Community Day.